Hillary 1994: Lock Up Offenders Forever, Build More Prisons

On the heels of the social unrest caused by a string of law enforcement involved deaths of African-American males across the country, today Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton called for an end to mass incarceration.

However, a little more than 20 years ago in 1994, Clinton spoke in support her husband, then-President Bill Clinton, and his sweeping crime bill that would build more federal prisons and “lock up violent offenders so they can never could get out again.”

In a 1994 CSPAN interview, then-first lady Hillary Clinton pushed for the stalled crime bill saying, “This bill will put more police on the streets, would have locked up violent offenders so they can never could get out again, would have given more prison construction money available to the states as well as the federal government.”

Presently, more than 2 million Americas are imprisoned and an African-American male born today has a 1-in-3 chance of spending some time in prison during their lifetime, a statistic that some attribute to the 1994 law.